In each performance (the performer being supposed in the same state of mental and bodily health), the tendency will be to repeat the immediately preceding performances more nearly than remoter ones. It is the common tendency of living beings to go on doing what they have been doing most recently. The last habit is the strongest. Hence, if he took great pains last time, he will play better now, and will take a like degree of pains, and play better still next time, and so go on improving while life and vigour last. If, on the other hand, he took less pains last time, he will play worse now, and be inclined to take little pains next time, and so gradually deteriorate. This, at least, is the common everyday experience of mankind. So with painters, actors, and professional men of every description; after a little while the memory of many past performances strikes a sort of fused balance in the mind, which results in a general method of procedure with but little conscious memory of even the latest performances, and with none whatever of by far the greater number of the remoter ones. Still, it is noteworthy, that the memory of some even of these will occasionally assert itself, so far as we can see, arbitrarily, the reason why this or that occasion should still haunt us, when others like them are forgotten, depending on some cause too subtle for our powers of observation. Even with such a simple matter as our daily dressing and undressing, we may remember some few details of our yesterday’s toilet, but we retain nothing but a general and fused recollection of the many thousand earlier occasions on which we have dressed, or gone to bed. Men invariably put the same leg first into their trousers—this is the survival of memory in a residuum; but they cannot, till they actually put on a pair of trousers, remember which leg they _do_ put in first; this is the rapid fading away of any small individual impression. The seasons may serve as another illustration; we have a general recollection of the kind of weather which is seasonable for any month in a year; what flowers are due about what time, and whether the spring is on the whole backward or early; but we cannot remember the weather on any particular day a year ago, unless some unusual incident has impressed it upon our memory. We can remember, as a general rule, what kind of season it was, upon the whole, a year ago, or perhaps, even two years; but more than this, we rarely remember, except in such cases as the winter of 1854–1855, or the summer of 1868; the rest is all merged. We observe, then, that as regards small and often repeated impressions, our tendency is to remember best, and in most detail, what we have been doing most recently, and what in general has occurred most recently, but that the earlier impressions though forgotten individually, are nevertheless, not wholly lost.